Cable Hook-Ups

Liz and Reece live it up on the documentary cable show Kink. Courtesy Showcase Television.

The cable industry’s money-green slip showed briefly last week when Rogers Cable, Canada’s biggest cable operator, offered customers a dirty weekend: free porn on three pay-per-view channels from Friday, April 29 through Sunday, May 1.

Didn’t happen, turns out. Rogers got cold feet, cancelling the offer 24 hours later, thereby ensuring more controversy. Did that mean Rogers’ two million customers in Ontario, New Brunswick and Newfoundland were safe from the temptation of free adult entertainment?

Hardly. For the last year, Rogers’ movie channel, M-XS, has offered free porn after 11:30 Wednesday through Saturday nights. There’s also an adult entertainment reality series preceding the X-rated movies — Family Business, the story of L.A. pornographer Seymore Butts’ struggle to make ends meet.

What was unusual about the recent Rogers controversy was that cable’s inventory was finally being acknowledged. For the truth is, every weekend is a dirty weekend on cable TV.

Adult entertainment is one of the most lucrative forms of show biz in North America. Americans spend $10 billion US a year on porn. That’s as much as is spent on going to movies, or attending professional sporting events, or buying music. Porn also tends to be a safer economic risk, largely because it is not prone to box-office flops the way the motion picture industry is. In Canada, the adult entertainment industry is estimated to generate more than $500 million in revenue.

Much of this material ends up on TV. In the last year, two 24-hour X-rated channels have been launched in Canada on digital cable (Hustler and X-channel). Then there’s pay-per-view porn on cable and satellite, as well as all the adult entertainment that shows up on cable channels that are, except for weekends, squeaky-clean broadcast citizens.

Anyone in eastern Canada channel-cruising on a recent Friday around midnight might have found a raunchy hand puppet on City-TV (Ed the Sock cavorting in a hot tub with strippers), the movie Midnight Love on Black Entertainment Television, gauzy erotica on Showcase (Red Shoe Diaries) and Family Business, followed by porn, on M-XS.

Bedroom eyes: Tracey Cox, host of Hotter Sex, and a pair of unidentified lovers. Courtesy Life Network.

Even Discovery Channel and Life Network get down and dirty on weekends. The former airs The Sex Files Friday nights at 11:30, while Life goes with Hotter Sex late Saturdays. (“After the break: Has tantra provided an alternative to penetrative sex for Michelle and Mick? And lesbians Rosa and Terry see if it’s any easier for same-sex couples to keep the honeymoon going and going…”)

It should be noted that amid all this sawing and sighing, one Canadian specialty channel, Showcase, is providing an adult entertainment series that really is entertaining. The show is Kink, a documentary series that surveys unusual and varied sexual activity in Canadian cities. In past seasons, the series had done Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. Starting this Friday, the filmmakers venture to Winnipeg, searching for the sexual extremes of “Canada’s longitudinal centre.”

Kink is pitched as steamy adult entertainment. The opening credits to the 11-part series come with club party music, handcuffs and lots of open-mouth kissing. But really, the documentary series is more about life journeys than lovemaking. This is erotica as imagined by smart NFB grads — not so much going down, but Goin' Down the Road. (Story editor Karen X. Tulchinsky is a graduate of Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Centre Professional Screenwriting Programme.)

The most intriguing storyline in Kink’s fourth season involves Steph and Shelly, young lesbians who leave Dawson Creek, B.C., for Winnipeg with a rebel yell: “Let’s go like we stole something!” Soon, we find them in Edmonton, leafing through porn in a women’s bookstore. Shelly’s eyes are as big as a prairie moon. “There’s a big world out there,” she exclaims, trying to catch her breath.

But we soon notice Shelly’s disappointment when Steph buys $40 worth of merchandise at a sex shop. They’ve stopped in Edmonton to see Steph’s “dom,” Mistress Darkniis. You can tell Shelly wonders who the toys are for, and whether they’re going to have enough money to get to Winnipeg.

Eventually, they meet the dominatrix. Off Steph goes, and Shelly is left stranded, sitting on a bed in a motel by herself mumbling, “I felt like a third wheel.” The malapropism is heartbreaking, particularly when in the next scene we find Steph in bliss, with Mistress Darkniis tracing the 19-year-old’s naked body with a hot, slow flame.

The scene is genuinely erotic. There is a world of mystery here — a variety of unexplained stories. We wonder about Mistress Darkniis’s sad, knowing eyes and Steph’s need for pain. Is her relationship with Shelly another form of sadism?

Field of dreams: Steph hopes for sexual satisfaction in Winnipeg on Kink. Courtesy Showcase Television.

Another segment in the fourth season involves a Winnipeg dominatrix, Pandora, who is heartbroken because — oh, the irony — she can’t control her ordinary-Joe boyfriend, a frustration she takes out on one of her submissives, a middle-aged man trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey. “I’m going to throw you into the tub,” Pandora hisses. “And then I’m going to …” You don’t want to know the rest.

Later, tearing up in front of the camera, the dominatrix tells us, “I was born in Swan River, Manitoba. I was the town sweetheart. I was the little girl in ribbons … who did a solo every Sunday in church.”

What happened to Pandora? Will Steph and Shelly last in Winnipeg? Most shows on cable’s dirty weekend are impossible to watch for any length of time. After five minutes of a recent M-XS porn movie, the only thing I wondered was who was winning the playoff basketball game between the Phoenix Suns and Memphis Grizzlies.

Kink is far and away the best sex show on weekend television because it views its subjects as stories rather than wrestling opponents. Like any good story, you wonder what’s going to happen next to the characters — just as we might all wonder what cable TV would be like without adult entertainment.

Industry insiders acknowledge that porn is what pays the bills. A former TV executive once advised me that cable companies couldn’t make it without the profits generated by pay-per-view porn. Sex on TV, he said, was what kept the North American cable industry alive.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.